


my treasure map was on your skin (you're my land ahoy)

by ladililn



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Pirate, M/M, Pirates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 16:32:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5935195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladililn/pseuds/ladililn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis is a pirate. Harry has never been to sea, but he's eager to learn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my treasure map was on your skin (you're my land ahoy)

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when I decide to open my massive folder of unfinished 1D fic from 2012, find one that's 80% done, and decide I may as well finish it. Inexplicable pirates. Enjoy!
> 
> Title from "Mermaid" by Train + [_"Gay Pirates" by Cosmo Jarvis_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dysG12QCdTA), because obviously.

“That boy is staring at you,” Liam mutters out of the corner of his mouth.

“I know,” Louis says, taking a swig of rum and not looking. He gets stared at a lot. Stares that mean all sorts of things—stares like _I know that face_ , stares like _I want to punch that face_ , stares like _I want to fuck that face_. He likes all of them to a certain degree simply because he likes being stared at, but he does have a noted preference for the ones that end in cock in his mouth instead of blood. (Sometimes, when he gets carted off to jail, he gets both, but only by his own choosing. He’s always had a reputation.)

So he doesn’t look for a little while, let’s Liam do it for him, because after all, Liam is the responsible one. He looks a little tense but no worse than usual, and when Zayn and Niall bump clumsily into him, arms wrapped around each other and half-singing, half-shouting some terrible drinking song they must’ve made up themselves, Liam lets his attention be drawn away from the boy in the corner to berate them and more likely than not get roped into singing along. It’s probably all right to look, then, if Liam isn’t worried.

The boy is young, can’t be more than seventeen, with wild curls and eyes green like the sea. He flushes deeply when Louis meets his gaze but doesn’t look away, just grips his empty tankard more tightly, knuckles turning stark white against the grimy metal. Louis maintains eye contact as he finishes his own drink, tilting his head back to get the last drop, watching the way the boy’s eyes darken like night swallowing the sea.

He simply nods and the boy comes to him at once, hovering at his elbow like he’s afraid to get any closer but can’t bear being farther away. Louis smiles his most charming smile. It’s a trap in which he is both the bait and the snare. He buys the boy another drink with a fistful of stolen gold and spends the rest of the night watching him fall down, down, down.

 

Harry has never been to sea. He’s never even been on a ship. Eager young boys—so full of adventurous longing, so enamored with the romantic promise of piracy, so flushed and fervent in their desire for fame and infamy, fantastic wealth and poetic poverty, sworn brotherhood and the siren song of Louis’ smile—rarely ever have. Harry wobbles on unsteady legs and retches off the side of the ship, paying his dues to the sea. Liam takes him under his wing, as Liam always does, and within a few weeks Harry is climbing the masts and scaling the rigging with the rest of them.

It’s only then that Louis claims him, collecting on his plunder stolen from the little port town Harry once called home. He whisks Harry away from his hastily assembled hammock in a corner of the crew deck and brings him to the captain’s cabin. He holds Harry’s face very gently in his hands and strokes wayward curls behind Harry’s ears with his thumbs. “I am going to kiss you now,” he says, very seriously, and Harry nods with stars in his eyes.

Louis does kiss him, and kisses him and kisses him and presses him into the bed with exactly the kind of breathless abandon craved by the eager young boys who look at him so starry-eyed. He drives Harry into the heart of a raging storm with tongue and teeth and rescues him from the wreckage with apologetic lips pressed to warm sweaty skin. Louis has always been better at the wrecking than the rescue, but tonight he is both captain and navigator, showing Harry how to follow his eyes to the stars.

 

It’s high noon and calm seas when Zayn sights a Spanish galleon approaching off the northeast bow. Thirteen gunner, three mast, trundling its way along at six knots against the wind. Almost too easy. Sometimes, when the odds seem too great against them, they have to resort to schemes and trickery, run up false colors and stage a sinking or wrangle a dinner invitation just to get on board. But sometimes there’s this: cannons primed, cutlasses drawn, ever-Jolly Roger flying bold and true. A pirate’s kind of honesty.

Harry appears at Louis’ elbow, his favorite place to be, quivering with something—nerves, excitement, fear, who can say. He still doesn’t look like a pirate, not really. Louis thinks the crew looks at him as kind of a pet.

“Ready to go, sailor?” he asks, pretending he’s not looking at Harry at all. But he’s always aware of Harry in his peripheral vision, even when they’re on opposite sides of the ship.

“Don’t call me _sailor_ ,” Harry says, annoyed, “I’m a _pirate_.”

Louis grins.

“Alright then, pirate,” he says agreeably, turning away from the ship’s railing to lean back against it. Sometimes he finds it hard to believe that any king or conqueror who ever lived could feel as powerful as he does with his pistol in his hand and his ship beneath his feet. “Ready to earn the title?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Harry says, eyes instantly bright again, a puppy straining at the leash. His moods are as changeable as the sea, but even the stormy ones are quick and light, warm summer rain over rollicking waves. Louis is glad today’s game will be so easy. Harry still thinks of Louis as the pretty promise he locked eyes with one night at a pub; he hasn’t had to see him turn ugly.

“Stay close to Liam,” is all Louis says, and Harry rolls his eyes and says he will, and at that moment the cannons give a boisterous shout, and it’s another fine day to be a pirate.

 

Within a week they’ve lured three more heavily laden ships into their sticky web and had their merry way with them. The first ships were full of goods they can get a pretty penny for in Tortuga or Portsmouth or any other not-particularly-scrupulous market, but the last one contained barrels of cash, chests of gold, caskets dripping with jewels. The weight of their loot is beginning to make them slow, never a happy thing for a pirate ship, and besides, they’re eager to spend some of their newfound wealth.

They go ashore for the first time since picking up Harry all those months ago, and Harry stumbles onto the dock, unsteady now on land as he used to be on the water. Louis can move from land to sea and back again and never miss a step, no matter how long it’s been, but Harry doesn’t stop wobbling their entire stay ashore. He’s made a permanent trade, swapped his legs for fins and his lungs for gills. (Somewhere, a sea witch is laughing over an easy bargain.)

After a full day of the piratical kind of responsibility—making repairs, unloading goods, restocking supplies—they rouse themselves for a night of the piratical kind of carousing—broken bottles, slurred sea shanties, the beguiling charms of Portsmouth’s third-rate painted ladies. There are naval officers about, too: corrupt ones, the only kind that exist this far from the mainland. They turn a blind eye to piracy in return for a cut of the profits. Louis thinks it the most beautiful system in the world.

He’s playing poker over a table dusted with the sparkle of shattered glass when a certain officer sits crosswise from him and catches his eye through golden lashes. Louis smiles, a slow curl of the lips. His last time in Portsmouth he managed to buy off this beautiful young man for little more than a song and a blow.

The tilt of the officer’s hat means he’d like a second go. Louis considers it as he considers the cards in his hand. (Straight flush, and he has the best face in the game: nothing to worry over even if he were the worrying sort.) It’s a tempting offer. Any other occasion and he’d take it in a heartbeat. He almost does. He has a finger on the brim of his own hat, every intention of matching the officer’s angle.

But his eyes catch on Harry across the room. Harry, with his head thrown back, laughing in that disarmingly _open_ way he has, a casual unguardedness Louis always worries someone might take advantage of. (Someone beside himself, of course.) Louis can’t count the number of bright-eyed boys with a spring in their step and a song in their heart he has taken aboard, whether for an evening or a fortnight, but things are different now.

He’s made a permanent trade. The sea witch got to him too.

(Louis knows his fair share of pirates who have sworn themselves to each other under the flag of matelotage. He’s never pictured that for himself, partly because the idea of _settling down_ is antithetical to his very nature, and partly because he hardly needs to invite the law further into his life—even a pirate’s kind of law, unthinkable in the more civilized corners of the world. He still doesn’t, and yet—he thinks he understands, now, what would drive a man to divide his plunder halfway.)

So he doesn’t tilt his hat. By the next hand Harry has crossed the room and taken a seat beside him. Unless Zayn has taught him—and Louis will have his _head_ if he has—Harry isn’t privy to the complex signals a man can send just by the cut of his jib, but he seems to recognize the beautiful young officer’s interest in Louis anyway. He curls his hand around Louis’ arm, and then drapes an arm around his shoulder, and then shoulders his way into Louis’ side. He ends up practically draped across Louis’ lap, wrapped around him like a particularly clinging piece of seaweed, and Louis has to forfeit his third hand chiefly because Harry nuzzling into his neck is too great a distraction. (The officer took the hint and evaporated long ago.)

Louis finds he doesn’t mind. He likes Harry like this, drunk and possessive and eyes shining brighter than glass dust in the blazing candlelight. He likes Harry laying claim to him, like Louis is the plunder and Harry the pirate _._

“I _am_ a pirate, Lou _,_ ” Harry insists, and Louis smiles.

(The truth is that Louis is the shark and Harry is the chum, but he doesn’t say so.)

 

Louis holds Harry as he sobs. Harry has just killed his first man: a merchant, a husband, a father. Now a corpse. The man’s life fortune is spilled over the floor of Louis’ cabin.

Louis murmurs empty comforts into Harry’s hair, the two of them curled up in bed together. He doesn’t tell Harry not to cry. What difference do a few more drops of saltwater make on the stained wooden hull of a pirate ship? Tears only prove that every man carries an ocean inside him. Crying is the sea trying to get back to itself, to rejoin the vast unbroken blue that encircles the earth.

Right now Harry is drunk on his own tears, but later he’ll be drunk on rum purchased with the dead man’s money, and Louis will force him to admit what every pirate worth his salt already knows: nothing tastes sweeter than blood.

 

They go fishing if only for Harry’s laughter, delighted and sharp, as they wade into the cool blue green lagoon.

“I think I saw a mermaid, Lou!” Harry calls out to where Louis is sunning himself on the beach. (The rest of the crew not currently fishing has already retreated into the shade, but Louis doesn’t mind burning. It makes him laugh, really, the way the sun tries and tries to kill him but never quite succeeds.)

“There’s no such thing as mermaids, love,” Louis says, languid and lazy.

Harry looks rather put out.

“Yes, there are. I saw them on Liam’s map.”

“And did you see dragons on Liam’s map, as well?”

“Yes. So? It was right over there, Lou, I _saw_ her—”

“Okay,” Louis agrees, feeling particularly indulgent, “I believe you. Wave hello to the pretty mermaid for me.”

After a while Harry comes and flops down next to him on the beach. Louis props himself on his side and traces imaginary lines on Harry’s skin, charting out a course like Harry’s back is a map and every freckle is some dreadful obstacle—sharp rocks, sirens, sea serpents, whirlpools, hidden sandbars where a ship might run aground. He narrates aloud until Harry stops him, complaining that his imaginary world is too fraught with danger.

Louis gives in. The freckles become stars instead. Harry doesn’t yet know the night sky well enough to tell the difference between the real constellations and the ones Louis makes up, and Louis takes full advantage of the fact, managing to convince Harry that a certain cluster of freckles on his lower back just happens to be an exact replica of the mermaid constellation.

(On a clear night a week later, when their bright red skin has finally faded to a calmer pink, Harry tugs Louis down onto the deck and demands to be shown the mermaid. Louis eviscerates Pegasus and Andromeda to cobble together the right shape, wondering all the while how long he has before some crewmember makes reference to the correct constellations and the jig is up.

Instead—somehow, miraculously—the crew picks up on the change. They’re in the East Indies when Louis first hears Liam refer to the mermaid in the midst of navigational calculations. They’re back in the West Indies when Louis notices that Niall has scribbled _the mermaid_ into his star chart, complete with connecting lines that match up almost exactly with what Louis had first imagined. Sometimes even Louis forgets he made the whole thing up.)

In the Caribbean they get captured and thrown in the clink. Most crewmembers have been to jail countless times before, and know how to bear it with fortitude. There are different kinds of jails—from the dingy to the filthy, the permissive to the strict to the sadistic—and by Louis’ standards, this one isn’t half-bad.

Harry hates it. Louis can hear him sniffling in the next cell over, hear Niall’s attempts to soothe and shush him. (Louis, the captain, gets his own cell; the warden even lets him out at night to play poker. He’s careful to lose more than he wins.)

Harry is a merchant’s son. Harry still thinks piracy is romantic. Harry doesn’t understand the rats that lurk beneath.

Louis cannot fathom the depths of Harry’s seemingly bottomless heart. He can practically hear the way it breaks for the other inmates, many of whom the guards torture with impunity. Harry begs Louis to do something about it, but there’s nothing he can do. (For all that Louis has successfully convinced Harry that he is some kind of god of the sea, his true power amounts to little more than a drop of water in the entire ocean.) Only on the third day of losing at poker does he successfully manage to bribe their way free. _I don’t have coin to spare on anyone but my own crew_ , he tells Harry; he doesn’t add that he can’t imagine the amount of riches that would get him to consider it.

On their way out, Harry throws himself in front of a man at the receiving end of a jailer’s whip. The lash barely grazes him before Liam yanks him out of the way. It’s still enough for Louis to pull out his pistol and shoot the jailer in the face, which adds a certain flavor of excitement to their escape.

Louis waits until they’re safely back to sea before he lays into Harry himself.

“Don’t do that,” he growls, gathering Harry up by the ridiculous flowy shirt he wears because he insists it’s _piratical_ , whatever the hell that means. “Every man for himself in there, you understand? Out here, too.”

“But what about the pirate code? And honor before thieves and—all that?” (There’s that romantic notion again; they all have it when they first join. Louis doesn’t know how Harry has managed to hold onto his this damn long.)

“The code is a load of bollocks,” Louis spits. “Any fool who trusts in his fellow pirates following the code will be dead in a week. Do you think there’s a single member of my crew who wouldn’t sell me out for the right price? Do you think I wouldn’t do the same?”

“You wouldn’t, Lou,” Harry says, wide-eyed, as though the thought had never occurred to him. “You wouldn’t sell us out to the law.”

Louis snorts. “No, I’d die before I handed my worst enemy over to the law, but that’s got nothing to do with him. I’m talking about the sort of price demanded by another pirate, if one of my crew insults another and the captain wants his head. I have a price. I can be bought. Every pirate can.”

“ _No_ ,” Harry insists, and Louis is almost surprised by his zeal. “You can’t. You wouldn’t. We’re—we’re loyal to our own, we’re a crew, we’re a family. Not any of us, not Liam or Zayn or Niall or—me. Not me. You wouldn’t sell me to another pirate, would you? I know you wouldn’t. You’re not heartless, Louis. I know you. I _know_ you.”

Louis doesn’t answer. He wonders if Harry is right, if Louis really would rather die than give Harry up. If it is true, he doesn’t want to know it about himself. Either way. He’s never wanted to find out what his price is. He hopes he never finds out.

(What if he really _doesn’t_ have a price, no matter who the offerer? What if he would choose to die before he even sold his worst enemy to his greatest ally? What if Harry is right about his soft heart? Far from being a comfort, the thought sends shivers down his spine. A noble pirate is a dead pirate.)

“I lied before,” Louis says instead, turning away. “If the law offered me enough money, I’d sell them anyone.”

 

They find gold, as they always knew they would, someday, buried deep under golden waves of sand on an unassuming little beach in the Spice Islands. (Louis hates sand, because its waves are as false as its gold, but now he kisses the ground, not minding the grains that stick to his lips like barnacles.) They feast like kings and dance like drunkards, and Harry laughs, low and beautiful, and smiles that special bright smile that’s only for Louis to have, kisses him on the cheek and murmurs sweet nothings in Louis’ ear like he actually believes them, ridiculous and contradictory things like _we’re rich now_ and _all this gold is for us it’s ours we can take it_ and _let’s retire and be farmers and live like kings_ and _we’re the most famed and feared men on all the seven seas_. Louis has to kiss him just to shut him up.

Harry doesn’t know what Louis does: it won’t last, any of it, not their wealth nor their fame nor even their lives, not for much longer. The law is closing in. The law is always closing in, even when it’s never been farther away: that’s the life of the pirate. You can win a thousand times, be as clever and slippery as the sea has taught you, but someday everybody loses. Fifty years from now Louis doesn’t expect anyone to remember his name. Five years from now he doesn’t really expect to be alive.

Louis doesn’t care about going down in history, not really. He doesn’t even care about living like a king. He doesn’t need any of that. When his corpse is rotting at the bottom of the sea, coral pushing up through his ribs, lichen growing on his knucklebones, feeder fish nibbling on what used to be his teeth—all the pearls and all the praise in the world won’t bring him up again.

He’s not going to bow out quietly though. He has a map of the world that spreads out to all four corners of his cabin, and when he stands on it he feels like a colossus bestriding the earth. The uncharted portions of the world awaken in him a physical hunger, an aching need to traverse every water, penetrate every harbor, glimpse every last mile of golden coastline. He wants to swallow it all down, the whole world, every last drop, before it slips through his fingers.

(The trouble with drinking saltwater is that it makes your thirst worse and worse the more you try to quench it, and then it kills you. Louis was doomed the first day he ever set eyes on the sea. When he drinks, he drinks to drown.)

 

Sometimes Louis dreams of home.

Not his ship, not his sailors, not his sea—a port. A little cottage on a cliff’s edge. A proper home, on a patch of earth, with a little garden where Louis can watch the weeds grow.

They’re on their last legs, Louis’ crew. ( _Last flippers_ , corrects a voice in his head, one that sounds suspiciously like Harry.) The golden age has long since passed. Maybe it never really was.

Zayn has retired; he always was smart. He’s saved up enough to live a very comfortable life, if not a rich one—but a long one, rare enough for a pirate.

Louis wouldn’t be surprised if Liam went informant for the navy before long. He’s always been a bit of an odd match for the job, criminal by circumstance more than choice. In a different life, a fair one, he would’ve made a fine morally upstanding officer.

Niall rides each new wave and weathers every storm as they come. He loves the sea as much as Louis does, but while Louis relishes the ocean’s power, its darks and depths, Niall loves simply it for the freedom it offers. If the crew disbands, if the ship wrecks, if everything splinters and breaks apart, Louis has no doubt Niall will roll merrily on. He’d be just as happy on a fishing rig as another pirate ship.

But Harry is the sea. His hair has grown long and tangled, salty with sea spray. He has more tattoos than Louis does, most of them suitably nautical: a dolphin, a mermaid, an anchor, a compass. He wears those damn flowy shirts and accessorizes with bandanas. He prowls the deck, graceful and long-limbed.

Louis made Harry first mate soon after he came aboard, in name only, a ceremonial position; Liam didn’t mind and it delighted Harry so completely. It’s no longer so ceremonial. When he dives from the bow in a clear beautiful arc straight down to the water, even Louis forgets Harry isn’t a mermaid.

Harry’s hands don’t feel like cream anymore: the merchant’s son is gone. He is calloused and quick, ruthless when he needs to be, knows how to run the rigging, prime the cannons, disarm a man with one quick flash of his sword. He knows how to clean the blade after, to keep blood from turning to rust. He still has stars in his eyes but only at night, only when looking at Louis, only when Louis has him trapped in a tangle of water-smooth silk sheets and is whispering filthy nothings into his sweat-slicked hipbone _._

Harry can take ships as effectively as anyone, employing might or sleight of hand as the situation requires. But Louis catches the way Harry comforts their victims when he thinks no one is looking, bouncing a small child on his hip and helping a crying woman hide what’s clearly a valuable necklace. (Louis should take it anyway, he _should_ , but he doesn’t, and he hates himself for it.) Somehow Harry has still got that damn soft heart. Louis doesn’t know if this foretells Harry’s doom or his survival. It’s a harsh world, growing softer.

 

Louis doesn’t trust too long a run of luck, good or bad. Calm seas and clear skies he trusts least of all.

He’s on edge for a fortnight, until they run aground on a sandbar and spend the next week marooned, waiting for the tide to come in. They’re hungry and grumpy until Niall manages to shimmy up a tree and toss down one ripe coconut after another.

They make a bonfire to celebrate their feast. Louis breaks out his secret stash of rum, and the whole crew gets rip-roaring drunk. They sing sea shanties loud enough to wake the dead and dance wildly enough to kill them again. The whole spectacle reminds Louis of the early days of his career, when his ambitions amounted to little more than not being caught and not getting killed.

Two days later they’re back on the ship and out to sea again, the rise and fall of swell and trough like the deep even breaths of sleep.

Louis leans back against the figurehead, nursing a bottle of rum. He likes to sit here at the prow, straddling the dolphin as she skims over the waves. When he looks straight ahead to the horizon, it feels like he’s flying. This time, though, he reclines against the arch of the dolphin’s back, knees up, facing his ship.

He spots Harry up in the crow’s nest, so much taller than when he first brought him on board. Harry is a mystery, it turns out. Maybe that’s what got Louis’ attention in the first place. He’s always been good at reading people, seeing entire life stories in a quick glance, passing immediate judgment. But after all this time, he still hasn’t managed to figure Harry out. There’s a lot going on behind those eyes, serious one moment and playful the next. Louis never quite knows what he’s thinking. Louis isn’t sure when Harry grew up so much, or whether he wasn’t like this the whole time.

“You’re staring,” Liam says, appearing at his feet. He doesn’t like when Louis sits here; it makes him nervous. It’s a long fall to the shark-infested water beneath.

“I know,” Louis says. He hides his smile behind a drink.

Harry looks down then, happens to catch Louis’ gaze. Louis enjoys the quick succession of expressions that cross his face: surprised, bemused, pleased. Harry smiles, a flash of sunlight. That’s the one thing that hasn’t changed: when he smiles, Louis sees the same boy he saw at a bar all those ages ago, wild curls and eyes green like the sea.

Louis raises his glass, a toast.


End file.
